superfluous breaths like water tides pulling the horrid eye of the blue moon, so riddled in caucasian romantic numbness i forget the voices that came before and will come again … i must remember this … my father is my ground, my mother my sky, and my brother my forgotten desire, dancing with me here in the riverwalk silver lining of the canned fruit of being … the sweat of the fruit, the fructose of the moment … is not always as recognizable as i think it should be, which is the pointed arc of reality, i must wait for it to fucking hit like a lightning streak and have the will to stand up after the fall …

it smells (exhaust fumes and industrial smoke stakes aside) like spring. i heard birds yesterday for the first time in months, since they left me for the south

and yes Adam, there is a forest but i still do not see the trees …

The dead eyes of the red crustacean remain static, so impossibly so for its intact realism, its full body with moving jointed parts, on my plate. The buffet dish is revealing, splayed with the remnants of a culture used to over-consumption: there are still crumbs on the concave surface; my tongue has not grazed the surface to attract every last morsel of nutrients for my starved body. I am, all subconscious guilt aside, quite stuffed, toiling with the tail of the untouched, uneaten crustacean, willfully displaying its gravy crusted scarlet underbelly to Adam, who sits in exaggerated disgust across from me.  He is a vegetarian for the most extended reasons. And I am his antithesis, devil’s advocate for fetish’s sake, my own theory that everything is done for some attempt at getting high, a nauseous pursuit for chemicals that induce pleasure, and the most intense pleasure is garnered from the most intense tension or restrain from that pleasure, then its surprise release.  Ultimately, this tension and relief defense keeps me from the banality, the disappointment, the meaningless banter of living in a cultural life so removed from its roots as to render the entire system inextricably distorted and irrelevant.  Thus, I am at my inter-dependently developed, abstract core inherently rebellous and skeptical of everything that induces meaning or pleasure. It is a vicious cycle, not too far related to the placement and the existence of the uneaten crestacean resting in postmortem upon my up-turned concave, this plate trough I daintly pick from in mock reverence for its violent production processes. 

Over-analyzed, overdone, over stimulated always results in eventual boredom and depression in this redundant society, full of endless lines of buffets, Walmarts, shopping lists, and paper drawn pyramid structures of philosphies a hundred years old and still dying to live, still practicing an ingrained disgust for the poor foundation we all walk on.  As in, Adam’s cringing of this creepy-real crustacean, his cower from all that it means to the point of asceticism and self-revulsion. I am not so idealistically empathetic anymore, I presume that this is all beautiful anyway, like the rot of the tree, the rust of my car door, the stink of the 2 week old garbage, the day after smell of sex in my bed.  Someone was going to pay for the free consciousness of early American Manifest Destiny, and in accordance to the linear thought process of those who believe in Destiny we are the resultant children of a delayed experience … as such we rightly, humanly feel cheated and guilty all at once, for also having the default responsibility of being the future … 

But past this, I am finding that Adam is beautiful, too, in all his hopeless hope, in all his thin shouldered, weightless glory, in all his desire to make his weight light as his bones as a bird feather as his stretched, taught skin as a farmer as organic wheat fields he wants to plant in the minds of those who can feed everyone … and multiplied by 6 billion (the estimated human population of the earth) this sounds sound … taken as is, it is melancholic self-destruction I wish I could fall back into … but cannot because I doubt (which means I’m scared) of everything, including my own perception and inefficacy and predictable fallability.   I would fuck a war god just to prove a meaningless point of fucking it all.

He believes in fortunes of the subconscious fate, as in when you leave a place serving fortune cookies, you pick up the first cookie as quickly as possible, don’t think of it, don’t pretend to find the right one, just let it be … His was one of “grounded steadfastness and inherited wisdom,” which he clunge to in all its mass-produced, Chinese-mystique flare and his own dose of hopeless hope.  Mine was finding peace of mind in an old friend, which Adam smiled a reaffirming grin of theoretical (which means generalized understanding of experience) satisfaction, and taped it confidently on the dash board of my oil-burning, gas-powered, indirect Iraqi civilian asssassin of a car. They call it a Cavalier, which reminds me of cowboys and horses and the old west, of exploited new frontiers and horribly mistaken ideologies.  I have refused to take the fortune down even so, even after, and even before I become hopelessly in love with my memory of things I will never be able to grasp, not for lack of physical strength, but for displaced recognition of  grasping meaning, the power of being, and the removed enlightenment of just existing.  Of knowing someone who believes in everything and while you insist still in the face of loving fate to believe in nothing …

A few words from the mouth of a forgotten prophet disguised as artist: ~Joseph Beuys

“The dignity of man is inextricably bound up with the inviolability of the person, and whoever disregards this, leaves the the plane of being human …. Therefore, every way of using violence is an expression of conformity which thus consolidates that which it wants to dissolve.

“Really, why shouldn’t it be possible, in a society where democracy has been developed to a certain level, to discuss in the freest possible way the necessary further developments? Too many people already are afraid that if they did so they would become suspect as enemies of the constitution.

“Thinking Forms:  how we mould our thoughts or

“Spoken Forms:  how we shape our thoughts into words or

“Social Structure:   how we mould and shape the world we live; Sculpture as an evolutionary process; everyone an artist.”

and this man was a German, writing in the 50 and 60s, hmmm…

i think i just need a fucking break from this pressurized tank of progress … it’s just i get really pissed when i can’t even read a damned book without having to reread it because i can’t concentrate in this “made from concentrate” mess of art school, parental pressure, and fake dreams … it would all be fine if i could just read books … that’s how i got through the cesspool of middle school anyway … tried to in high school but excuses, a boy, and a father got in the way … i won’t make that same mistake again …

i suppose this is the result of running away for so many years … i have forgotten where i came from, who i am, why i am here, and what i am doing … numbly regurgitating old idioms taught by squeamish parents, half-interested teachers, old self-mirrored friends, careless boy fumblings in the haze of a desert life, everything some floating mirage of contrived meaning … i am contrived that’s why i can’t utter a single fucking word without cringing … i remember caring, only remember … i am trying to care, but in this i find i haven’t the time to be anything … i suppose i am not equipped to stay intact in this … i can’t seem to slow down worth shit … trying to hide, instead of attempting to develop is showing through, i hate my fucking parents for this … not allowing me to be myself without some kind of happy sheen, allowing them to think of me in some childish stupor of idealism … never attempting to let it grow, always wanting to make me tell, make me tell the big secret that underneath it all i knew they had no idea what the fuck was going on and they never should have had us, so they could use this knowledge of frailty against me some other day … and now i have spent so many years atempting to hide myself and run away from them, i feel utterly trapped in a place i was trying to avoid … this numb ache of there being something else that i will now never be able to see … only sense in a depressive haze of preoccupation .. i know this is what you were so afraid of wesley, this slow mind decay, you would rather die or destroy yourself or have a reason to be dead … i am so sorry, so sorry …

my cat, the one i got when i was seven, is slowly losing its mind, its back, between the tale and lumbar spine is so thin and hollow, and it shouldn’t be … its eyes, old gold liquifying in the crystal lights, are lop-sided, one pupil bulged out to the side … he stares off into and through the wall, when he jumps into my cold, cowering lap, he digs his claws into me to clinge to something, anything substantial … and i think i know him better this way, i know how he is fading … i am, too, my childhood dream, i remember your hope of a good hearty cat life with all the trimmings, all the full stomachs, aging in a beautiful wisdom that made the folds soften and the leaps more careful but still possible, not so pained and so forgotten, as if this was the only moment left and this actually was the only moment there ever was … and ever will be, learning being so ephemeral and experience being such an unsupported argument … no depth without memory, no wisdom without depth, no life without frailty, i suppose …

i remember aspiration … i remember wanting to know philosophy for depth, physics for understanding, art for beauty, read literature and poetry for humor and to characterize the rest // i remember desire even in the sterility of hours within hysteric progress, within a need to finish what i have started so monumentously, so devoted i have become to the religion of institutionalized education,

to say i can do this and still have a soul …

because it is so easy to forget why i am here, and even worse where it came from
and even harder still to remember who i am …

or was …